Years ago I overheard a Game Master (GM) complain about the players: 'They are ruining my story!'.

This statement have stayed with me ever since as a token of How To Be A Bad GM. You can be a good GM, but to be a great one you have to understand, and accept, that the game is not yours. The players are not there to act your story or bring your script to life. You are there for the players. Your job is to give them the best experience possible, regardless of your own aspirations.

Storytelling has always been a part of most of the things I do - in writing, acting, movie productions and roleplay. I have more than 10 years experience with LARP and several of them as GM and Non-Player Character (NPC). Last year I decided to challenge myself by making a pen and paper campaign based on the D&D rules but the setting from scratch.

My years as a GM in LARP has taught me a great deal about storytelling that is useful in many other aspects.

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Recently I discovered that there is a huge difference in the way we understand, interact with and create LARP throughout the world. So I looked into it and realized the way I do LARP is known as Nordic LARP (I'm from Denmark so that makes sense). The site nordiclarp.org has a good definition of Nordic LARP and especially the bit about collaboration:

QuoteNordic-style larp is about creating an exciting and emotionally affecting story together, not measuring your strength. There is no winning, and many players intentionally let their characters fail in their objectives to create more interesting stories.

(From https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Nordic_Larp)

To me the key to LARP has been storytelling, to make sure the players get the feeling of being a part of a story, preferably  like they are the main character whether they're an evil knight, a shady wizard or a greedy farmer. And yes, in my opinion every single player should feel like a main character. This is actually possible when the purpose of the game not is to win, not to be best (strongest, richest, most powerful) but to truly be your character. Not all characters wants the same. One wizard search for an ancient spell while the mercenary wants to sell all his goods because he needs the money.

Note that this is my personal conviction. I still meet players who just wants to fight with weapons and don't care about a story or a character at all.

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When I want to create a plotline in LARP I work with non linear storytelling. The first draft might be linear. But then I do the 'what possible choices could the players make?'-exercise. Sometimes I come up with multiples ways or plotlines the players might choose.

E.g. The players are asked to escort a wagon with a precious cargo through the area that is known to house a group of bandits. In the first linear plotline the players do the quest as predicted: They defend the wagon and get a reward for the safe journey. But what if the players are shady and decides to rob the wagon themselves? What is on the wagon? Who sent it and will they send out someone to take revenge? Or maybe the players seek out the bandits because they must have a holdout with a lot of loot. Should we place a bandit camp in the area for the players to ambush? In reality you can keep guessing and adding details but there is only so much you can spend your time on (and hopefully this is not your only plot) so you'll just have to choose a couple of options and keep them ready.

And then be prepared when the players choose to do something completely different than what you could imagine.

Because sometimes (let's face it - most of the time) the players will act in a totally different way than you expected. They will do stupid things, follow wrong leads and not pick up on hooks and hints. But that's your problem, not theirs. Now you have to follow the players and re-create the story around them. Go with the flow.

Maybe the players wont help the princess in distress asking for their help. Maybe they decide to kidnap her and blackmail her father. Then don't force the players into the story you originally imagined. Dismiss the bandits looking for her and send in the knights who will try to rescue her from the players.

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My personal opinion is that if you let the players lead instead of forcing them into your story then everything will be better. Let me elaborate.

Of course you might have to help the players along a plotline, giving them a gentle poke in the right direction from time to time. But there is a huge gap from that and to forcing the players down a plotline they didn't choose. There are several reasons why you should let the players lead:

A World of Free Choices

The players will feel like they can make an impact on the world. They are not just sheep hustled around. Letting the players have a say in the story and world gives a more dynamic universe.

When the players know their choices have consequences it forces them to consider their actions more carefully. And with a story that is not fixed, the players will not try to figure out 'the correct answer' they know you have prepared, but instead try to figure out the best way to proceed for them and their characters. And that leads to the point of Nordic LARP focusing on 'staying in character'. It is often considered a deadly sin to act on information or knowledge you have that your character wouldn't.  As stated earlier, sometimes a player will choose to fail rather than stepping out of character.

E.g. A mercenary wants to show me his goods "just around the corner". I know that his character is an NPC that is up to no good, but my character doesn't. So I go with him even though he might rob me.

Have more fun - Improve your skills

When you let the players lead, the story will go in directions and take turns you couldn't imagine. It's actually fun to see how the story ends. And you will have to be more creative because you have to make things up as you go and make quick decisions (because the players don't prepare you, they just do stuff and you have to react on them instantly). Not only do you have to improvise acting but you have to improvise your storytelling. It's more challenging but it's more fun too.

When you are used to think non linearly, to improvise and to let your ideas go (because the players didn't follow the carefully written plotline you prepared) then you have a huge advantage in every day life.

At work you often have to compromise and to throw away work or ideas. For instance, I've written 7 articles for the local news paper but they only chose to publish one. And I'm okay with that! I also work with online communication and social media, and let me tell you: people never receive or react to a post the way you predicted. But I'm used to work this way and to turn the storytelling around (because yes, storytelling is also how companies communicate online).

The most precious skill, to me, is the ability to improvise. For more than a year I worked as a substitute teacher, often without notice or material. I literally had to improvise almost every day. And I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I played the character as 'an authority: a true adult' and the children (and the teachers) believed me. Sometimes when I'm nervous (e.g. at a job interview or an exam) I just play the role of someone with confidence. It actually works.

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When you start thinking about your stories in a non linear plotline, you open up the stories to the players. The players will find themselves in a more diverse world where their choices have consequences. You will be challenged more but more skilled too. You will create stories together with the players, and like in most cases when you collaborate with others on creative work, you will create something that's better than what you could do on your own. And sometimes it'll be way more stupid and boring than what you made up, but that doesn't matter. The players are not there to entertain you. You are there for them, to make sure the players are having fun. Because in the end LARP is a game, and games are all about having fun.

This follows on from my previous article, the Bones of Earth, in which I look at the basics of constructing fantasy maps. In this second article in the series, I explore unnatural geographical features or settings and how to fit them into fantasy worlds. We'll only be looking at a small selection of possible ideas – there are many more out there!

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Generally cities and settlements come after geography; however, there is a big sci-fi exception to this, the megacity. Essentially, humanity has an effect on the landscape. This can be seen even in low-tech worlds where old barrows (LOTR) or mottes of castles can dot the landscape. The megacity is a step beyond – civilisation built on top of civilisation, layer after layer, so that pretty much all one would find beneath the city is more city. At this stage, and particularly given the large amount of land area a megacity might take up, it is worth marking out areas for such on the map. Remember that historically most of the world's largest cities are coastal and/or based near navigable rivers. Of the world's ten largest city areas today, only three are not on the coast. Of those (Cairo, Delhi, and Mexico City) two are on major rivers and the third is based around a former lake. Generally it is fair to say that a megacity large enough to show up on a map is going to be a coastal area or strip.

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Islands that act as ferries or even fly, or mountains that shift to block the path of the heroes on a quest; one of the key things that land does not do (at least not often) is move, so that's precisely what it CAN do in a fantasy setting. You may not necessarily want to include these on your map (for example a flying island is hard to include on a static map) but if there are rules as to where the thing can go it's worth thinking about them. Forests that move can also be an excellent example of this (in a sci-fi world you could even have forests or mountains that are regularly migratory, in which case the migration route should be worked out at the mapping stage).

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This is common in sci-fi particularly, though it appears in fantasy too. The magic-blasted or post-nuclear wasteland is an excellent setting; cartographically, it gives a large area which is difficult for armies or characters to cross, and which can be filled with arrays of mutated monsters and other such gribblies. Generally wastelands tend to be inland areas, in line with real desert and tundra areas, although it's worth noting that a real nuclear wasteland would probably be a coastal region since nobody's going to bother dropping billions of pounds/dollars/roubles/yen worth of explosives onto somewhere sparsely populated when the enemy war effort could be obliterated by dropping them on London/New York/Moscow/Shanghai.

Wastelands are likely to end at seas, large rivers, or mountains which can take the blast and prevent fallout from catastrophes spreading. It can look odd to have a wasteland covering a range of large mountains as we would intuitively expect that either the mountains would shield things on the other side from a large explosion. Logic, even in nuclear holocaust planning, is still worth using from time to time.

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World to world portals are part of huge numbers of settings. When they are big enough to be used on a large scale, they are most definitely major setting drivers. River crossings and bridges within a world are often fought over a lot as major crossing points, and that's when if you go far enough around there are other options, or you can get boats, etc etc... when there is a trade route or raiding route which is literally the only one of its kind (or one of a very small number), it makes eminent historical sense for it to be a hugely important feature. As such, if it's a natural part of the world (rather than having been created in a city), it's worth considering its position at the mapping stage.

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The Edge Chronicles are the shining example of this. The simplified world paradigm is basically the idea that you can build a world setting that does not obey any rules of physics or common sense whatsoever, so long as it's simple enough that nobody bothers asking questions about the geography. The edge is basically a sort of peninsula (jutting off what, nobody knows) which sticks out into the sky. The base of the peninsula is all forest, then there's a mire/wasteland, then a city at the end. That's really literally it. This absurd setting, however, fulfils its function well; it provides a crystal-clear backdrop against which a ton of interesting biology and culture can be thrown. The map is made to give a clear range of settings, but in a stylised way – this makes it easy for characters to move between parts of the setting and encounter different things without too much worry about detail or realism.

Other possible simplified worlds could be based on a certain principle – for example, having a land with four equally sized islands representing the classical elements where water is wet and forested, air has high mountains and tall trees, fire is all volcanic and earth is low-lying vegetation, rocks and mines. Again, this completely ditches any inherent interest in the geography, but it gives an excessively neat and simple backdrop for me to put characters and cultures against which can be useful. Consider different possible ideas you could use in this way – any cultural trope can work (yin and yang, the kingdoms of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, seven deadly sins, alchemical substances, you name it).

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This isn't so much a feature as pointing out that, above all, you can do whatever the hell you like. Take The Carpet People – the entire book is a fantasy based on the idea of civilisations rising and falling and desperate battles being fought between the fronds of a carpet. There's references to a giant plateau famous for its mining that is pretty clearly a 1 penny piece, and so on. Equally, you could write a fantasy set amongst gods playing snooker with the planets, or set inside a computer where the characters worship the players as gods and the "map" is just a set of windows explorer directories. There are potential worlds made entirely of food where the world may centre around the problem of eating as compared to living in homes, and so on.

Generally, the suspension of disbelief thing hits in here. The more unusual your paradigm is, the harder you're going to have to work to keep the user of viewer of the setting engaged. Also, the odder the paradigm the more people are going to focus on it – if it's not a simplified paradigm (see above), then an odd one can easily become the gimmick or idea that your whole setting centres around. Think carefully!

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The Carpet People (Terry Pratchett) – This is a good example of a very unusual setting which nevertheless works well (it is important to note that part of the reason it works well is as humour though, being essentially a work of satire rather than more serious fantasy)

[Gulliver's Voyage to Laputa (Jonathan Swift) – the original flying island (Gulliver's Travels was first published in 1726 and has been in print ever since), including probably the first ever description of aerial bombardment as a system of warfare. Chapters 17 to around 24, available to read here:
http://www.online-literature.com/swift/gulliver/17/
The rest of the book is also well worth a read, and covers three other important early examples fantasy settings (Lilliput, full of tiny vicious people, Brobdingrag, full of friendly giants, and the land of the Houyhnhnms, a society of intelligent horses totally governed by reason).

The Edge Chronicles (Stewart/Riddell) – Not the most serious or even best written work of fantasy fiction, but a good read and more importantly an excellent example of an unusual setting that works as a basis for serious fantasy rather than parody as referenced in the "simplified world" section.

Monsters are a traditional and welcome staple for fantasy RPGs. The monsters from the D&D Monster Manual have even become cliché in many regards, both for good and for ill. A couple of bloggers have started to newly interpret the existing monsters, myself among them.

(Note: I blogged in German, but reading my blog is not necessary to understand this article. If you do not speak German and want to read my blog, you can use DeepL to translate my posts. When I tested their automatic translation on my posts, it achieved sensible results.)

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My goal was not to to change monsters just for the sake of it. Instead, I wanted to look at monsters from different angles and turn them into something more useful for my games. If I liked a monster, I would often just add some ideas for how to employ said monster creatively, instead of changing the monster more fundamentally.

A good example of this approach is the dragon turtle. Since I liked the dragon turtle, I did not change its description at all. I just added the idea that merfolk might use them to sink ships or for armoured transport, as well as an adventure seed called 'Great Aunt Dragon Turtle'.

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First, I always looked the monster's description up in an encyclopedia like Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica, but I also visited some encyclopedias that specialise in folklore or RPG settings. Here I tried to discern how the monster was typically used and what alternative uses existed. For example, was the monster's name also used for a vehicle, a piece of software, or weapon system? If so, what did this choice of name imply? Did it appear in other media, and what role did it play there? In one case I even read a PhD thesis because it offered an excellent overview of frogs in art.

Where words were too archaic or particularly common I looked them up in a dictionary, too, either to learn about their history or to find synonyms.

I took sparse notes with a reminder where I got the ideas from. Those notes would be put randomly on a piece of paper, to be connected by coloured pencil later once I started to connect the dots. I made sure not to drown in detail, but keep it short and specific.

Another very important tool was the picture search. I would enter either the monster's name or, if I did not find anything or just too much stuff, a synonym, and I'd then look at whether there was anything out of the ordinary. As an example of a monster inspired by a particular picture, look at the goblin.

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My posts always started with a paragraph about the monster's typical use. In a few sentences, I would describe it and how it was employed in adventures. If I renamed my version of the monster, I would also mention the original name. This allowed readers to identify the original monster I'd used quickly.

As a second step, I usually offered some insight into the monster's uses outside the RPG and fantasy genre, be those uses older (like folklore) or in other genres. I kept this short, a paragraph or two at most.

Third, I gave ideas of how the monster might interact with the rest of a campaign world, what ecological niche it filled, and how to best spice one's adventures with it. One of the results was gardening necromancers, who combined their undead guards with blood-sucking plants as a means to keep their refuges safe.

Fourth, the monster's stat block, as written in the Basic Fantasy RPG.

Fifth, and finally, the new description of the monster. This usually entailed one paragraph for physical description, one for fighting tactics, and a third for other ideas regarding the monster.

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I spent between one hour and three hours per entry, depending on how clear or diluted my vision originally was. All in all, I re-interpreted 93 monsters, which took me about five months.

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The first few monsters were extremely hard, and took a long time to accomplish. Over time, researching the background information turned into a routine though. It also became easier to establish new connections between different versions of a monster and turn them into something useful for role-playing games. Writing new monsters is definitely a skill that can be learned and honed.

It is important to interact with other people and talk to them about your monster ideas. If you have a friend or good aquaintance with similar interests, talk with them. Micro-blogging platforms like dice.camp can also be helpful, as they force you to write your idea consciously whilst allowing you to bounce your ideas around for new thoughts and threads. Without such support, I would have definitely faltered on the second ooze monster instead of turning the grey ooze into a colour stealing flubber.

So I would say almost anyone who does not despise language and art can do it! Simply start with the first monster in your bestiary, research it a bit, write your ideas down, add the stats and a short description. The first few attempts will probably not feel right, but that is normal. Set yourself a pace, for example one monster per week, and a publishing rhythm, for example a Tweaking Tuesday. Then, go ahead, publish your first monster on a forum or a blog, and continue to practice each week with a new entry. After about twenty or so monsters, you will get the hang of it!

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Writing science fiction can be based on the inspirational reception of the real thing:

• How's the brain mapping doing?
• What kind of edges is CRISPR/cas9 busy cutting?
• All fine and fast at the particle accelerator?
• Hey, gravitational waves sound like a promising plot core.
• Not to mention my favorite multipurpose vehicles, dark matter and energy.

Most scientists do science fiction writers¹ two big favors: They publish hard, because they have to. And they strive hard to deliver abstracts accessible to people with no real clue about their line of research, a.k.a niche. Because scientific journal gatekeepers tend to be nothing but a more literate and better informed sub-segment of this overwhelming majority of humankind. Thanks to this lucky combination of hardships, inspiration is but one click away.

Most science fiction writers don't care. They prefer to walk well trodden paths:

• Beaming around far more substantial stuff than quantum states is considered standard practice.
• Artificial gravity and time travel have undergone commoditization.
• Don't get me started on the established ways of moving one specific kind of notoriously short-lived, non-extremophile and partly sapient primate across interstellar distances.

Be it hard or soft, innovative or traditional, most science fiction breaks the bounds of current technological feasibility. That's the genre core. The first level.

On the second level, the corresponding sciences would be sociology, psychology and economics, most science fiction declares the straight OECD based Caucasian male hero daydream of Hollywood lore a permanent fixture, as immutable as the basic laws of physics are flexible.

Five, fifty, five hundred or five thousand years from now, some straight middle-class WASP going by the name of Steve/John/Michael from original/Neo/Nova New York will save his home planet/space station/galaxy from whichever self-inflicted or alien induced harm. In the course of which he gets more or less intensely and explicitly laid with some Jane/Sarah/Gloria he met on the way. She can nowadays be black and/or emancipated enough to take over some of the beating/fencing/shooting. There might be an odd non-white or non-straight team member. But that's about it, maximum modernization mode.

No problem. Science fiction is entertainment. Not aspiring to be the edu or info kind of tainment. Steve and Jane, John and Sarah, Michael and Gloria, talking audience now, have every right to have fun. As author of an early trilogy mostly conforming to convention, I'm fine with it.

But. Because there's always a 'but', there has to be some 'but', with science.

What if more science fiction writers broke with tradition? Out with New York, Atlanta, London and Berlin. The future belongs to the young, and a lot of them live in Lagos, Agadir, Rio and Shenzhen. New globally relevant locations and the corresponding cast, a second fiction level on top of the usual technological breakthroughs. Sounds easy? Won't change much? Sure?

From a practitioner perspective, double level science fiction raises inspiring questions:[/size]

• No one is going to blink at my Virtual Reality stuff. The brain-machine interfaces are pretty futuristic, but who cares? Basing the corresponding IT major in near future Nigeria, that's the part that won't go down easy and will need explaining.
• Gay marriage, unisex toilets and transgender pronoun preferences, banalities in Silicon Valley. The corresponding cast and scenes will evolve differently in an imminent future Lagos. And that's just the pointy upper end of a big iceberg of traditions, religions and conventions.
• If my heroes are called Abeo, Infunanya and Mobo, do I introduce connotations that some people will associate, rightly or wrongly, with these names? If my hero is called Wang Xiu Ying, do I need to explain about Asian first and second name conventions, or can the audience be assumed willing to achieve learning by reading?
• With a team of five black guys, none of them can be 'the black guy'. Do I still need to mention the race bit, for all of them, to make sure no reader defaults to Caucasian? Sometimes wish I was doing movies... Will a scene involving surprise about the presence of a white person work standalone, or does it require a narrator giving readers a couple of hints?

Writing double level science fiction is great fun, otherwise I wouldn't keep doing it. I very much encourage all science fiction writers, whichever their personal background, to give it a try.  Just brace yourself for one effect: What we don't usually touch, when we imagine all kinds of technologically advanced futures, tells us a lot about what is wrong in our present. Presents.

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1. The author, proudly delusional, insists on being considered a writer. Of science fiction, imminent to near future, on the hard side of soft and uystopian, including race and gender relations. For details please check out troim-kryzl.biz for #AltLeftSci

The greys of morality in gaming and fantasy settings have, over time, become an increasingly important part of settings and plot design. Tolkien and Lewis, some of the most important progenitors of the fantasy genre, painted pictures of good battling and resisting evil, using fantasy to frame a clearer, more inspiring moral world than we see outside these sword-swinging environments. Many earlier computer games had similar attitudes: you were, by definition, the hero: even if your hero wasn't classically heroic on account of being a janitor or a plumber, morally it was clear what was what.

The primary countervailing current to this is  to "grey down" all morality, with the Warhammer universes among other presenting worlds that had almost as negative a view of protagonists as antagonists. Increasingly, we saw worlds where elves were arrogant, humans fallible and corrupt, and dwarfs avaricious and grudge-bearing. "Grimdark" stood against "High" fantasy, partially separated by setting but mostly by the accuracy of moral compasses. Nowadays, it is common to see literature that abandons moral clarity altogether (Game of Thrones arguably sits in this category), or games with multiple endings that reflect the varying possibilities of the characters' moral choices (e.g. Bioshock).

Both in SFF fiction and in games, though, there's a tendency to rock back towards "categorising" morals. It's easy to see why: when explaining whole new worlds, and doubly so when you need the world to be able to react to a player's actions, you need to somehow embed those actions into a pretty fundamental and calculated framework of how the world works. Even for writers exploring grim and unpleasant settings, the tendency to want to give entire factions, rather than just individuals, a certain philosophy or moral character is one that inherently tends to lead to the creation of worlds with natural morality – that is to say, ones where the fabric of reality has a moral stance embedded into it.

In Warhammer, the primal force of Chaos is presented as an ultimate evil, driven by Lovecraftian-evil deities; in Star Wars, the Force is split into light and dark. These naturalised, ingrained moralities allow a sense of "good" and "evil" that maintains the fundamental paradigm of a Tolkienesque or dualist worldview without that needing to reside in any particular character. In Star Wars, what little we see of the Galactic Republic is less than positive, and the moralities of different characters are often established by linking them to a certain side, all of which is enveloped by its anti-Jedi or pro-Jedi worldview. The Light acts as a strong moral proxy such that the writers often do not need to demonstrate particular moral actions to enforce it – the only key points are when a character "falls" from one side to the other, much like for a D&D Paladin.

In Warhammer 40,000, the natural morality creates an even more bizarre situation; the Imperium of Man are to all intents and purposes a galactic fascist superstate, constantly obliterating innocent sentient beings, bombing entire worlds of their own people into oblivion, and being lorded over by chapters of genetically engineered super-soldiers who are a law unto themselves and will happily fight against the regular army. The fact that this setting maintains a "moral compass" is solely due to the fact that Chaos is presented as a primal evil – in other words, the force of evil has been naturalised into the world to the extent that good and evil are judged merely as sides of a struggle, and classic moral tells like "exterminating billions of people might be considered possibly a little bit evil" are no longer relevant.

Natural moralities are thus a powerful tool for writers in creating worlds of grand conflict but mutable morals compared to our own. They can also represent a problem, however –when it comes to balance. Natural forces tend to balance out, or have ideals of balance associated with them. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, fire balances water, earth balances air, and so on and so forth. Naturalising your moral forces risks difficult implications. Are they inherently balanced? Should they be? If your "light and darkness" forces are averaged to dusk, does this bring harmony (as all is in balance) or mean accepting that half the world is evil? This is perhaps the point that most undercuts systems with natural morality. Whether or not it's possible or balanced to make the world "all light", it may well be morally right for the characters in a setting to fight for that anyway. If balance means accepting evil and oppression, if it means selling the good and innocent to the night, then for a genuinely morally good character that will always be too high a price to pay.

In short, I think we as writers and creators need to be careful about "naturalising" our moralities in games and writings and setting design. I'm very much a fan of the idea that blatantly immoral actions should have consequences for the characters we create, but these are better produced and make better stories when dealt with on a case-by-case basis than weighing up into the long term balance of a character's soul (helping 99 old ladies across the road doesn't then give you enough "points" to get away with pushing the hundreth into the path of a truck, etc). As major world religions have discovered in the past, a point-scoring moral system ends up feeling contrived or even gamed after a certain point.

We should also, just as importantly, recognise what we're doing with our moralities - especially with naturalised morals, which are proportionally more dangerous as they can lead to a "but I'm on the good team" syndrome in which characters undertake objectively evil actions under the cover of "being a good guy". This, played right, can be an extremely clever storytelling tool, but all too often it is played unironically and players are left without an appreciation of the fact that the things happening in front of them are straight-up evil. If you want to reinforce the idea that X is actually not evil/a valid choice, or you're setting up for a "hey look that was evil" twist, great, but being self-aware about the moral compasses you're ingraining into your worlds is vital. If we don't have that awareness, eventually players/readers/viewers will start seeing the gaps between the story we want to tell and the events that take place within it, breaking the immersion we seek to create.

We create fantasy settings, in part, to tell people something about the world and their place in it. It is down to us as creators to decide how our worlds react to moral stimuli, and decide whether to show them a world that is bleak or bright, muddled or clear - whether our protagonists must accept their reality or not. It is, ironically, taking this careful moral control on the part of the creator that gives those we create for a genuine feeling of character freedom, and of living in a world where, natural or not, good or evil, it is the direct results of the choices of characters that, as a constellation not a tally-sheet, form the people that they become.[/size]